


Good Soldier

by ancientreader



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: BDSM, Bottom John, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Top Sherlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-29
Updated: 2015-11-29
Packaged: 2018-05-03 21:56:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5308316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancientreader/pseuds/ancientreader
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This would be easier, if John could talk about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Good Soldier

**Author's Note:**

> My smut is usually joyful, but in this one, although I hope it's obvious that John and Sherlock love each other, joy's in short supply. Please heed the tags. 
> 
> [Chryse](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Chryse/pseuds/Chryse), peerless wit, excellent friend, and smokin' hot pornographer, made me a gift of her sexy and funny and touching story ["You,"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5277746) and you should read the whole series it's part of if you need some uplift after this. Or even if you don't. I would have made "Good Soldier" a present for her, but really, "Thanks for the lovely fic! Here, have some angsty kink that in no way suits your taste!" seemed kind of like giving Sherlock one of Anderson's old shirts to wear. You're on my radar, though, lambchop.

There’s something John wants, sometimes. He hates himself for wanting it. Sherlock has no idea how to change that — not the thing John wants, which in itself is fine with Sherlock, but the hating. 

Sherlock knows about the _something_ only thanks to too much whisky, drunk by John after some case he doesn’t remember anymore because it has been so thoroughly overshadowed by the conversation that followed it.

No, not a conversation. Sherlock hadn’t dared utter a word.

*

_“You know what I think about sometimes. Sometimes. I wonder — ”_

_Around his drink, Sherlock came alert. He made his breathing slow and relaxed; he incorporated small movements into his posture, because perfect stillness marks alertness, and John wouldn’t keep talking if he knew how carefully Sherlock was listening._

_“ — what would it be like, to be knocked down and stripped raw, only not — you know.” John made the gesture that, if Sherlock were feeling unkind, he would translate for himself as “You can’t expect me to actually say this, but you’re Sherlock Holmes, so work it out.”_

Of course, Sherlock did. 

*

John’s tread on the stairs, grim, is the first sign. 

John shuts the flat door with such care, Sherlock only just hears the latch click. He nods at Sherlock but his gaze slips away and he doesn’t speak. _Crack_ — a break in the control, there — as he sets a mug down for tea. Closing the cabinet just a shade too loudly. 

They’ve never talked about this directly; Sherlock made some deductions, and then developed some hypotheses based on those deductions, and he seems to have got it right, or right enough.

*

_“ — The whole time I was growing up, that was the line. ‘Stand up straight.’ ‘Fight.’ ‘That better not be you I hear whingeing, John.’ A bloody litany. Wait, do you even know what a litany is? Too religious for you, maybe.” John laughs a little but doesn’t look at Sherlock and doesn’t wait for an answer. “But we’re all jelly inside, aren’t we. Not all this standing up straight. ..._

_“What am I even saying?”_

_John shook his head, as if no answer were possible._

*

John when he thinks he needs to keep himself leashed is the version of himself most frightening to Sherlock, much more frightening than when he shouts, or even than when he chinned Sherlock when Sherlock came back from the not-exactly-dead. John keeping himself leashed will eventually do something with his mouth that has almost the shape of a smile but is not a smile, and he will look out from under his brows with his face set and he will begin hitting things. Punching the kitchen counters. The walls. Once, bloodily, the mirror in the loo. Or if he is intent on preventing himself from hitting things he will stamp out fast with his head down and march — Sherlock thinks of it as marching, though he’s not sure John recognizes that that’s what it is — for hours, unseeing, come home stinking of angry sweat, not relaxed or untroubled but simply too exhausted to rage, and still miserable. The — “mood” seems too weak a word; the condition, then — passes over after a day or two, or three, and it leaves John diminished and weary. 

In this way it is entirely unlike Sherlock’s strops, which can be amusing to John and even to Sherlock, and which provide relief.

John has always been good at giving comfort, or at least willing to try. Sometimes, nowadays, he is able to ask for comfort, as well. But not when he’s like this; when he’s like this, he can’t ask for anything except by the indirect route of asking for nothing, of marching, of holding himself tight and hard like a concrete block. If not for one drunken half-confession, Sherlock would have no idea what to do.

*

_“ ... just being nothing, just emptied out of everything like that ... Sometimes it seems like the only thing that —” John stopped himself here and took a gulp of the whisky. Under other circumstances, as Sherlock was aware, John would think it a waste to use Glenfiddich for mere fortification._

The advantages of having a consulting detective for one’s lover. Often, however, Sherlock wishes John would simply tell him things. 

*

_“ ... but how would I even ...?”_

*

Pretending to ignore John, he goes into their bedroom for the zip ties. 

He has never asked, after these episodes, whether John is so sunk in wretchedness that he’s genuinely unaware of Sherlock’s movements, or whether John is pretending to ignore him too. It’s more probably the latter; it might even be that John is pretending so hard that he persuades himself he’s unaware. Letting himself know what Sherlock is up to would be very much like asking for what he needs.

*

_“When would you want that?” Sherlock asked, as if idly. Someone not him might have thought John was answering a question other than the one asked:_

_“You know what gets me? Kid comes in with bruises in the wrong places, and ‘Oh my Tim, he just doesn’t know his own strength.’ Would you believe people are still walking into doors, like none of us has ever heard that one before? Ah, they use their imaginations, all right. Just not on the story they tell the doctor. Fuck it.”_

*

All in all, Sherlock reflects, as he approaches John, there’s a lot of not-asking going on here.

John is standing at the sink, head bent, his mug trembling in his hand. He sets it down, by apparent coincidence; Sherlock wrenches his arms behind him and zip-ties his wrists behind his back.

John roars with rage.

*

_“Sometimes I’m just — sick of being a good soldier, you know?”_

*

Sherlock doesn’t know, never having been even a figurative good soldier. But he does know John.

“Shut up,” he hisses in John’s ear, and shoves the back of his head down so his face is nearly pressed against the dirty dishes in the sink and he’s on tiptoe. With his free hand Sherlock gropes John’s balls, then squeezes, hard enough to make John grunt. Still gripping John’s hair, he hauls off and slaps John across the arse, once, twice, half a dozen times. It doesn’t hurt as much through John’s trousers as it will, later, when he has John stripped, but it hurts enough to convince John that when Sherlock says, “Shut up,” he means it. John pants voicelessly.

“Better,” Sherlock says. He lets go John’s hair in favor of his ear, because John’s hair is far too short to give him a secure grip; also, if John struggles, the hold on his ear will hurt more. John does buck, once, making himself gasp; Sherlock gives his ear a twist, making him gasp again, still voiceless, good, and Sherlock drags him over to the coffee table and shoves him onto his knees and then pushes his head down so his arse is in the air. Another few slaps for good measure. “Try to get up and I’ll hurt you quite a lot more.” 

John’s chest is heaving. He whines a little but doesn’t move. Sherlock lets the whining go in favor of getting the cheval glass from their bedroom; it’s too heavy to carry one-handed, and the whole premise of this ... scenario depends on its seeming spontaneity, the taking of John by surprise. Lube goes in his dressing-gown pocket.

He doesn’t like doing this in their bedroom.

When he gets back, he finds John has indeed got up and is pulling at the zip ties, abrading his wrists.

Usually by this point John is compliant; if he’s still fighting, then he’s in a bad way. Sherlock allows himself a moment to feel a pang before he commences to give John what he needs. He sets the cheval glass by the fireplace and steps forward.

John tries to head-butt Sherlock, but his bound wrists put him off balance; Sherlock steps to one side, grabs John’s arm, takes hold of his ear, and with this two-handed hold he shoves John face-first into the wall, giving him just enough slack to turn his head so the impact doesn’t break his nose. “Fuck you,” John says.

“‘Fuck you’ means nothing and I’m not the one who’s getting fucked tonight. You know how to make me stop,” Sherlock says, viciously, “but I don’t hear you saying that word, do I? I hear you saying ‘Make me.’ Don’t doubt that I will.”

John bucks. 

How it is: if Sherlock is whipping John, or fucking his face, or slapping his cock, and it’s too much, John can say stop. Almost always, Sherlock knows when to pull back before John needs him to, but if John does say stop, Sherlock will stop at once. When they do this, though, John never says stop. He curses and fights and sweats and gasps, sometimes he shouts with pain, but he never says stop. 

Sherlock doesn’t hit John at once but instead takes his hand off John’s arm and reaches around and undoes John’s trousers and shoves them and his pants down to his knees. John tries to kick sideways and backward but can’t do it effectively with Sherlock’s iron grip on his ear, and anyhow his legs are trapped by his clothing. He stands with his ribs heaving. His arse is still red, a bit, from the spanking through his trousers earlier; now Sherlock hauls him back from the wall and drags him toward Sherlock’s chair and over Sherlock’s lap. He takes a better grip on John’s ear and begins to slap John almost as hard as he can, aiming for the spot where arse meets thighs and knocking John forward with every blow; to avoid the resulting yank on his ear, John tries to hold steady, but to brace himself against the impact he has to tense his muscles, which makes the spanking hurt more ...

Normally, Sherlock would pause every so often, say at every dozen blows, to give John a breather, to stroke his arse and balls and soothe him, to give the endorphins a chance to catch up.

This is not that game. It’s not a game at all. Hearts are not light.

There’s a phase during which John tries to cover himself with his bound hands.

There’s a phase during which John screams at each blow.

There’s a phase during which he bucks away from Sherlock’s hand regardless of the pain in his ear. 

During that phase, Sherlock reaches between John’s legs and pinches his balls, hard. He does this more than once.

The spanking goes on for a long time, long enough that Sherlock thinks he may be close to breaking skin, on his own hand if not on John’s bum. The relief when John goes limp is indescribable.

Sherlock delivers another dozen blows, just to be certain; John responds with only a soft whimper to each one. _Finally._

Sherlock pushes John to the floor.

Another thing that would normally happen around now is that Sherlock would offer John something to drink: John will be parched after so much gasping, panting, crying out. 

Instead, Sherlock says: “Get up. On your knees.”

John struggles up. He is hanging his head. His prick is half hard. Sweat has soaked his shirt and his hair. He says nothing. 

Sherlock’s hand is killing him; he puts it behind his back, so John can’t see, and flexes it. He would like to cup John’s head and draw it, draw John, toward himself; let John rest against him. 

John won’t be able to rest yet, however; he has a ways to go. Sherlock says: 

“You know where the mirror is. Get there.”

John shuffles over to it, on his knees. Sherlock thinks about the carpet abrading John’s knees. John’s bunched trousers and pants, his bound hands, hinder him; Sherlock watches him nearly lose his balance, then recover; nearly lose his balance, then recover. The fine hot skin of John’s buttocks shifts. It takes John over two minutes to arrive in front of the mirror. If he fell over, Sherlock would not catch him. In order to make sure of this, Sherlock has been holding his own hands behind his back, just as John’s hands are behind his back.

“Look,” Sherlock says.

John raises his head and looks. Instantly, he flinches away.

“Don’t make me say it again.”

John looks.

Sherlock comes to stand behind him. He sees what John sees, but then again, not, since what John feels at the sight of himself, Sherlock is fairly sure, is contempt. Past that is where John needs to go.

Contempt for John is not at all what Sherlock feels.

There is no further need to restrain John physically, and for the next step he needs the use of his hands. Sherlock takes out his pocketknife and slices through the zip ties. John keeps his hands clasped behind his back, though his arms must be sore. Sherlock finds this scenario difficult, but always when he and John are having sex he loves this moment, when John is physically free but lost in obedience. For a few moments, he lets himself relax and simply enjoy the sight of John with his eyes fixed on himself, half stripped, half hard, entirely submitted to Sherlock.

Sherlock catches himself just as he’s about to say, “Good.” John isn’t ready for praise or kindness yet. “Stand up and take off the rest of your clothes. Shirt first, trousers and pants next, then bend over and spread yourself. I want a good look at the hole I’m going to fuck.”

John is no longer pretending that he is not complicit in his abasement. He strips quickly and bends nearly double to hold his buttocks apart. 

“Look at you, spread open and reeking of sweat. It would improve things if you had my come dripping out of that filthy arse,” Sherlock says. It would, too. One of Sherlock’s favorite things is to rub his come into the skin of John’s welted buttocks, and to pinch at the welts, alternating between this and caresses to John’s prick that are insufficient to bring John to orgasm. 

But this is not that, not something they do for fun. Sherlock closes his eyes and takes a deep breath.

It might be efficient, in some ways, just to shove in, but Sherlock’s hopes for John’s later life and his own don’t include fecal incontinence, so he will not, ever, fuck John without prep. If the physical care he takes with the muscles of John’s arse is at odds with what John needs emotionally at the moment — to be treated as if he did not matter — well, that’s what words are for. “Look at you,” Sherlock says. Sneers. “Pig. Don’t move.” He slicks his thumb and rubs it around John’s hole, catching it in the hair and making John whine and tremble. 

When, inevitably, John’s control breaks and he thrusts, Sherlock shoves him over. “Hold your prick out of the way and spread your legs,” he orders, then slaps John’s balls four times. John screams red-faced behind clenched teeth; the head of his cock shines and seeps above his protective fist. Sherlock’s chest aches at the effort of will John must exert to keep from either covering his balls or fucking into his hand. He takes hold of John’s sack and tugs. “I could twist these off you right now,” he says. Sweat has broken out all over John’s chest; his lower back will be slick with it by now. The rich smell of it rises from him. “Yes,” John whimpers, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll be good.”

 _Almost,_ Sherlock reassures himself. _Almost there, almost there._ John, the usual John, shouts _Christ yes, give it to me_ when Sherlock’s whip lands just so and has never once promised anything but to give Sherlock the ride of his life. John promising to be good is John with no idea, any longer, what he’s saying or who he is outside this moment. “Back up on your knees and spread yourself again.”

John moves, fast and clumsy. His breath shudders. The injured shoulder must be hurting badly by now, though it’s unlikely he can single that pain out from everything else Sherlock is inflicting on him. “Filthy,” Sherlock says, slicking a finger to fuck John with. “Filthy sissy. Look at you, you dirty little whore. Look at your bum opening up to get fucked.” John has gone soft and open now. Sherlock squeezes a great gout of lube directly into his hole, another over his own cock; he slaps John’s hands out of the way, grabs him by the hips, and shoves him backward onto himself, hard. John wails.

“You’re no better than a girl, _Johnny,_ you’re no kind of man, you should be ashamed of yourself — oh, are you going to _cry_ now, you wet little cunt — ”

Sherlock always finds it difficult, by this point, to keep up the tone of contempt, to string out the stupid insults (“no better than a girl”: honestly, it’s no wonder John’s sister has spent so much of her life refining the art of holding her liquor _like a man_ ); he drives himself toward orgasm grimly, because that last crack has done the trick. Accusing John of crying will push him over every time.

 _Yes_. He slumps over John’s heaving back. 

It has occurred to Sherlock that his orgasms during iterations of this scenario supply a perfect illustration of the difference between relief and pleasure. It would be physically uncomfortable not to come; there is no delight in coming. John is where he needs to be, though, and that’s what matters: sobbing convulsively, making no effort at all to modulate his cries or swallow back his snot or stop shaking. 

“Pull yourself together.” “You’re a man; act like one.” “Stand up straight. Fight”: words that Sherlock would never say, can’t imagine wanting to say. Sometimes it seems to him that John never stops hearing them. 

The only means John has to quiet them is this.

Sherlock pulls out and arranges himself alongside John, who weeps and weeps face down. He won’t have come; orgasm was never the object of this scene. Sherlock tugs him closer and strokes his head; _I love you,_ he thinks, and _I could give you this anytime; there’s no need always to take the long way round;_ and _I wish you didn’t hate yourself for needing this._ He bites his lip to keep himself from speaking.

It has sometimes been disadvantageous to Sherlock that he tears up easily, that his path to tears is direct and brightly lit. But the thought of John’s father fills him with a despairing hatred that he has never once wept over. The feeling is too cold for that. 

One day, perhaps, they will do this, he thinks, and something will be different; one day, they’ll do this, and after John has wept himself out, they’ll speak.

*

_Sherlock waited._

_“Let’s have another,” John said, and a lock clicked shut._

**Author's Note:**

> As so often, [TSylvestris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TSylvestris/pseuds/TSylvestris) magically saw exactly what was needed and then let me in on the knowledge. Some people are brilliant. Others of us are lucky to know them. 
> 
> If it needs saying: Sherlock can get away with deducing what's up with John and what to do about it, but the rest of us really ought to negotiate explicitly with a trusted partner if we're going to play in such rough emotional territory.


End file.
